


Five Ways Ross Jenkins Joined UNIT

by lonelywalker



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:19:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ross encounters aliens, tin dogs, mysterious blondes, and the strangest career fair ever on his quest to find the right job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Ways Ross Jenkins Joined UNIT

1.

I joined UNIT because I wanted to be a rock star.

It might sound like a bit of a leap. I mean, going from guitars and amps and posters of Jimi Hendrix on my wall to doing push-ups in the mud at bloody five in the morning, but really it seemed pretty natural at the time.

Who wants to be in the military when they’re a kid? No one. Well, you know. Apart from the ones who have it in the family, or saw Rambo way too many times, or have a beret fetish. Doesn’t pay that much, and you could spend the rest of your life in a jungle or a desert… They never have wars in _nice_ places, did you notice? I mean, I’d be pretty pissed off if I lived in a desert too. No pizza delivery. No Sky TV. No Saturday afternoon football. Camel racing. They probably have camel racing. Figures.

So, yeah. Seventeen. Got my GCSEs and I’m sort of hanging around at school because I’m not really the college type but I’m not really up for signing on or for going off working as an intern in a hairdresser’s. I mean, honestly. I had this mad Mohican haircut and a guitar and I hung around the high street hoping Simon Cowell would trip over me and give me a record deal. You hear about that sort of thing all the time. I mean, if Will Young can make millions, who can’t? But eventually Mum was all, “Ross, _dear_ , when are you going to get yourself a job?”

Solution: careers fair! And career fairs, well, you know what they’re like. Half of ‘em are high-tech jobs you can’t get unless you’ve got specs held together with sellotape. Other half are, you know, internships in hairdressers basically. But there’s desks for each of the armed forces, and they’ve got all these cool little models and things. So I end up talking to them. Bit of a laugh. Thought maybe if I came back home with loads of forms signing away my life to the RAF Mum would be all, “okay, son, just stay home – I don’t want you being blown to bits after all.”

Thing is, those recruiters are really on the ball. I couldn’t get away. Not even saying that I’m afraid of heights, get seasick, am totally allergic to sand, and a pacifist. I’m such a pacifist that I’d be like Obi-Wan Kenobi in _Bridge Over The River Kwai_ and sit out the war in a tiny wooden hut. ‘Cept he went crazy at the end and blew lots of things up. Well, yeah. Moving on.

So I’ve given them every excuse I can think of, and they’re probably thinking they don’t really want me anyway. I mean, who wants a skinny little wannabe representing Queen and Country, eh? But there’s this one guy. Old geezer. Moustache. You see them in their uniforms and can’t imagine they’ve ever done any fighting in their lives, right? But he comes up to me and says, “Ross, isn’t it?” And I’m all, “yeah?” And he says, “so what do you want out of a career?”

I’m a bit stuck for an answer, so I say: “I want to travel the world, meet interesting people, and not kill them. Unless they really deserve it.” And my mind’s on _Star Wars_ anyway, so I add: “Meeting aliens and traveling back in time would be cool too.”

So this guy looks me up and down. I mean, literally. Up. Down. And, very slowly, he smiles and hands me his business card. It’s only got four letters on it, but everyone knows what they mean.

And that’s how I joined UNIT. (I never really missed the Mohican.)

 

2.

I joined UNIT after I ran into an alien at a sci-fi convention.

I know what you’re thinking – Klingons and Minbari and lots of nerds with too much makeup and way too many Star Trek shirts. But it wasn’t like that. Not really. I was up in the city visiting some friends I’d met online. And before you get all “oooh, you’re a Trekkie”, I’m really not. No way I’d dress up or anything, and I haven’t even seen _Voyager_. I was there cause Neil Gaiman was doing a signing, and he’s pretty cool for a geek. _American Gods_ is a classic no matter which way you look at it. Also, this martial arts dude from _X-Men_ was there, and I’ve got nothing against guys who kick ass.

So I’m waiting in line, and this guy wearing pretty cool makeup and a boiler suit completely crashes through the line, smashes the table into Neil Gaiman (Neil Gaiman!) and runs off. Then, moments later, this guy dressed in this totally retro period military thing with what I guess is a toy gun skids around the corner and sees all the mess.

“Where did he go?” he asks me. And he’s looking right at me, and I can see he’s really worried. Maybe the guy nicked his limited edition Counsellor Troi figure or something. So I point. And off he goes.

I guess it would be nice to rewrite history a bit and say I helped the guy to wrestle an alien to the ground and spent my Saturday saving humanity. But actually, after the Gaiman signing, I went to the bathroom. Guy’s gotta pee, right?

The guy’s in there. Not the bloke in the boiler suit, but tall-dark-and-suspenders. He’s washing blood off his face in the mirror and I’ll all, “all right, then?” And he grins. Very white teeth. Knew he had to be American before he even got a word out.

“Fine. Tracked down the rogue alien and put him in the…” He looks blank for a second. “Where do they put the bad guys in Star Trek?”

“The Brig,” I say, before I can tell myself not to. “But I’m not a Trekkie.”

He’s still smiling when he holds out a hand. “Captain Jack Harkness.”

“Uh, Ross,” I say. “Ross Jenkins.”

“Ross,” he says, and I’m never heard anyone say my name before like they were actually _thinking_ about it. And then, again: “Ross.” And a smile. Never stop smiling, those Americans, do they? It’s like they’re mocking NHS dentists. “You know, you’d look really, really cute in a red cap.”

And that’s… Well, that’s how I lost my virginity in a bathroom stall at the _Holiday Inn_. But I did eventually join UNIT, too. Honest.

 

3.

I joined UNIT because a nice lady with a tin dog told me not to.

“Oh, you don’t want to get involved with them,” she said. “Far too many _guns_.” And she mussed up her son’s hair when she said it. He was smiling, but I think he knew what I saw in it all.

We were waiting in a dentist’s office in London, and the end of the world was all over the front pages of every magazine in the entire room. Guns were exactly what I needed.

And that’s how I joined UNIT. It really was that simple.

 

4.

I joined UNIT because of a girl.

That’s how it goes, isn’t it? You’re perfectly happy living your own life, working at a normal job, eating chips, watching telly, playing a bit of footie on the weekends, and then some random girl comes into your life and it’s as if gravity’s stopped working.

I didn’t leave school with too many bits of paper, but that’s okay. I mean, it’s who you know, isn’t it? And when everyone else is all smoking and drinking and hanging around street corners, you’re in with a shot. “Look at Ross,” people would say. “Nice young lad. Clean cut. Always smiling. We like Ross, we do.”

So I was a complete natural for customer service. I like to help, even if it’s just with matching ties to shirts and all that, and at Henrik’s it was all about service. They took that whole “customer’s always right” thing to extremes. Pay was good, though, and as long as you don’t mind smiling so much your bleedin’ mouth hurts by the end of it, it’s a pretty nice place to work.

Second week I was there, I got totally lost. I mean, if you’ve ever been to Henrik’s, it’s… well, it’s like a city. Got all these storage facilities and underground passageways and staff lifts hidden round corners. Sort of like the tube with no maps. So – boom – of course I end up in the middle of the lingerie department, surrounded by frilly pink things, with no idea how to get back to shirts ‘n’ ties. I take the first exit I can find, because there’s no way I’m spending another second there and having someone think I’m a trannie. And – smack – I’ve walked right into this girl and made her drop her lunch.

Her name’s Rose. I sort of find that out afterwards. Actually, I find that out when she disappears.

It’s like buses, or something. You go ages without falling head over heels for someone, and then, of course, they completely disappear just as you might want to try getting to know them. She really did, you know. Disappear. She didn’t quit. Didn’t pick up her paycheck. I even got up the nerve to go see where she lived, but I just ran into this guy who said he was her boyfriend, and that ended that.

The thing is, right after that happened, things started getting really strange in London. Aliens. Murders. Disappearances. And, yeah, _aliens_. I’d never really been scared of aliens before. Never really thought about it too much, to be honest, but I figured that they’d be the cute and squishy type, or coming to us with superior knowledge about how to get world peace. Something like that. Instead, what do we get? Giant flippin’ snowflakes and deadly Santa Clauses, and the Titanic about to crash into Buck Pal.

I know it’s sort of silly when you think about all the non-alien stuff that goes on. People run away all the time. Have bad things happen to them. But I couldn’t help wondering if something like that had happened to Rose, if she’d been snatched by aliens. Maybe it was just stroking my ego – I mean, a hot girl _couldn’t_ just leave of her own accord if I was about to ask her out, could she? But that’s why I started paying attention to the UNIT ads.

They weren’t all “Be the Best” or, like, “join us and become a qualified engineer”. It was just UNIT, and by then we all knew what that was. A way to feel safe again. A way to _be_ safe again.

I just wanted to help. And that’s how I joined UNIT.

 

5.

I’ve always been in UNIT.

I know it’s only been public knowledge recently, but UNIT’s been around since long before I was born. It’s undergone some major changes in the past few years. It’s become a lot more high profile. We didn’t used to have massive skyships for a start. Or lasers. The lasers are pretty new, even if they’re really high on the list of weapons for an organization that mainly deals with defeating alien threats. I think watching _Babylon 5_ is what our weapons department calls “research”.

But, yeah, I was born into it. I’m a UNIT brat. UNIT’s always had a Jenkins – or several – since way back in the fifties when my grandmother practically ran the place. I mean, they called her a secretary, but we know better.

It was pretty tough at school. There were always kids around who could boast about what Mum and Dad did – you know, show off medals or talk about all the cool tech or gruesome details. The things I saw or heard about, even as a little kid, were both much cooler, and completely off limits.

Now, you try to get a little kid to keep his mouth shut about aliens and lasers. The good thing is, people don’t believe little kids so much when they talk about stuff that “obviously” isn’t real. And by the time everyone was forced to start believing in it, because there were Daleks and Cybermen and giant snowflakes in London, I was already running around in a uniform.

I guess I could’ve chosen another career. There’s a lot you can do, after all. A lot of kids don’t follow in their parents’ footsteps. But it’s different when you’re a UNIT brat. Once you get a glimpse of the entire universe, it’s impossible to look away. Once you understand that you can help, that you can be part of that thin red line between humanity and the evils of the universe, you can’t run.

I’ve always been in UNIT. It just couldn’t have been any other way.


End file.
